Miami City Ballet has got a brand new bag. The company made its reputation on high-quality performances of Balanchine, and it has a strong corps, one of the most cohesive in the country. But while it once stuck with proven masterworks and the infrequent commission, it’s also becoming a lab for new works.

A key facet to Paul Taylor’s new vision for his renamed and retooled company was presenting works by other important American choreographers. But the program, featuring two Taylor classics, “The Word” and “Promethean Fire,” and Shen Wei’s 2003 illustration of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring,” instead of merely showing dance by different American greats also worked to underscore Taylor’s unique genius. The ballets of the two choreographers could not be more different, and neither could Shen’s and Taylor’s dancers.

David Neumann keeps a messy stage. Paraphernalia clutters part of the space. A big stack of objects on the left looks like a workshop. Plastic pillows float over the rear center of the floor, and plastic sheeting lies lumped to the right. There also are three wooden boards, a solitary lamp plus other items. These objects aren’t in total disarray, but placed so as to leave empty areas, presumably for the performers. Four of them appear: one middle aged man, one almost middle aged man, one young man and one woman. Dressed casually and diversely in black, the quartet assembles to deliver a stylized movement phrase. It is in moderately slow motion. None of the four cast members dances like a dancer. Their effort resembles that of the regulars in my neighbors’ exercise class. Perhaps they are trained actors? What they soon convey through more naturalistic action is a hierarchy among them. Three are assistants, required to do the bidding of the middle aged man.

March 27, 2015

The newly named Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance looked, for tonight, very like the old Paul Taylor Dance Company, as the ensemble performed three of Taylor's haunting examinations human emotions, each anchored in a specific time; the first two, "Sunset" and "Eventide" make that clear in their titles, and the third, "Piazzolla Caldera" with its dark, dank atmosphere, is clearly set in a land of eternal midnight. "Sunset", choreographed in 1983, is a sympathetic look at a group of soldiers, who dance with a droughty innocence and underlying vulnerability--at one point Michael Trusnovec bends down to tie his show, and that simple, ordinary, and universal human gesture seemed to encapsulate the tragedy of young men sent off to war.

With a cast of five striking dancers, Sally Silvers let her imagination loose, inspired by the iconic imagery and power of Alfred Hitchcock. Silvers combined dramatic dance imagery with sound and lighting to evoke not only the fear and tension of Hitchcock’s films, but also to echo Hitchcock’s landscape of alienation, and his mastery in the realm of the unexpected.

A mixed program can provide many pleasures: choreographic and musical variety, more stars per performance, and also lots of chances to compare, contrast and speculate. Can we conjecture which of the leading couples of ABT’s tradition-tinged triple bill in Washington will live happily ever after after their curtain falls? The imperial pair whose courtship we witness in George Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations”, is meant to rule together. Yet, might not revolution intervene and come to blight their lives? The cow poke couple Agnes De Mille matches up in “Rodeo” may settle into a home on the range but weren’t they kids still, just starting out, who would have had to face America’s mounting divorce rate? To me the two whose future seems the most uncertain are Antony Tudor’s troubled Hagar and her family’s gentleman Friend in “Pillar of Fire”. That’s because Tudor gives us a very close look at them only at first. Initially, we watch their behavior as through a magnifying glass. Hagar sways: one instant she is sensual and the next she is ashamed. He, at the start, is inexplicably, enigmatically insensitive. It takes him time to respond to Hagar and Tudor never tells what eventually opens his eyes. At the end of “Pillar”, Hagar and her Friend seem far away, very distant, as if we were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. They wend their way through the woods, seemingly without effort, but Tudor’s narrative has ceased to be clinical and instead become vague.

For years I have walked out of ODC/Dance concerts with a spring in my step because the company's buoyant physicality so beautifully sets in relief the individuality of its members. The longer they dance, the more deeply they dance. Choreographers KT Nelson and Brenda Way think deeply about our place in this world and then shape the raw material into finely crafted choreography which more often than not speaks to the heart as well as to the brain. This time around, however, their world premieres, Nelson's "Dead Reckoning" and "The Invention of Wings," a collaboration with Way, left me downcast.

Paul Taylor, with a couple of guest companies in tow, has been dancing up a storm at Lincoln Center these past two weeks. Sweeping through the theater like a spring wind, the varied repertory has had extraordinary range. Light comic pieces have alternated with dramas of the darkest content, pure dance compositions with ones that are as much theater as dance. The live accompaniment of the Orchestra of St. Lukes (made possible by the season’s multi-million dollar funding) has been consistently divine. Sunday afternoon’s program contrasted “Company B” (Taylor’s at once innocent and ironic take on Second World War Americana as represented by the Andrews Sisters music) with “Piazzola Caldera” (his viscerally appealing take on Argentine tango), with the Limón Company’s rendition of Doris Humphrey’s perennially classic 1938 “Passacaglia and Fugue” providing visual and thematic counterpoint in between.

March 23, 2015

Unremitting cheerfulness on stage is about as wearisome as what may become eternally blue skies in California. The soul craves variety, complexity and a good shot of mystery. That's not what ballet's "Don Quixote" is about. And we know it. A good part of the blame -- should we be in the blaming business, which I happen to be in right now -- has to go to the Petipa/Gorsky collaboration. They were determined to create an applause machine for the court. And they did. Makes you have less regret for having lost some of Petipa's other early works. But the major problem that makes this ballet difficult to sit through-- yes, I know about the opportunities for virtuosic dancing -- are the 106 minutes of the Minkus score. We badly need a new "Don Quixote", romantic or not. Preferably a comedy. Any composers out there? After all Nicolas Nabokov had a go at it.

Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance, née Paul Taylor Dance Company, in its opening season under the new name at Lincoln Center managed to preserve its gloried vintage amidst the fresh coloring of its reincarnation and the added texture of live music.